Free Textbooks!
Lauren KawamIssue date: 8/7/08 Section: News
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Yep. You read it correctly. Free.
The New York-based company will launch a pilot program in August. It will be supplying four business/economics textbooks online to thousands of students on 15 campuses in America. If all goes well, by Spring 2009, Flat World Knowledge will be giving textbooks to anyone who wants them.
By simply giving away these books, Flat World is greatly upsetting the $5.5 billion a year textbook industry, something that co-founder Eric Frank said is part of their foundational business model.
Frank, a previous employee of Prentice Hall, the largest textbook publisher in the country, explained that Flat World was created to fix the issue of price in the marketplace.
"Fundamentally, we want to fit the student like an open glove," he said. "If he or she wants to download it and read it on the computer with interactive media, that's available. But, we're also giving students the option of getting a cheaper print version, an audio book, getting podcasts and study guides and even making it available for Kindles [Amazon's wireless reading device]."
Flat World is achieving this feat through the idea of something called an open platform, which is a less than intimidating website where you can actually acquire the books. Students will have access to textbooks without paying a dime, and the option to purchase supplemental materials for next to nothing.
"Students can get what they want and are able to choose how they want it; faculty is able to make revisions and improve their material and they also make the call when a new edition is to come out, and authors benefit from being able to have an open editorial staff who can guide them in the right direction when writing the book," Frank said.
Eric Alonas, a bioengineering senior at Arizona State University, said that free textbooks sounds like a great idea mainly because it is one less expense that students have to deal with.
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